CE-15.08

Title:

Newspoints

Author(s):

Luv Ahuja

Oral Defence Date:

Wednesday, August 12, 2015 - 13:00

Location:

TH 434

Committee:

Profs. Arno Puder & Dragutin Petkovic

Abstract:

A difficult and challenging task for journalists is to record an incident in a way that people can understand and interpret easily what actually happened and how it happened. Usually journalists record information about an incident on paper and later arrange the content they have recorded with some modification before publishing it. It is often strenuous and time-consuming to record every single minute piece of information on paper and later recall it to map that information to its corresponding incident. This not only adds laborious work and decreases productivity but could also restrains journalists from recollecting important points about the incident which can in turn potentially reduce the speed and accuracy of their reporting. To make their work easier and more efficient, we designed and developed an Android application called Newspoints that helps journalists to record audio clips and video footage, and at the same time tag and arrange the collected assets for production and editing. The primary goal of Newspoints is to allow journalists to take record incidents and information concurrently. In addition, this application helps journalist’s record details of an incident with few clicks while at the same time eliminating the need to carry usual tools such as paper, pen, audio recorder and camera. Newspoints organizes and guides producers through the digital newsgathering and reporting process. Notes, multimedia and interviews and research are automatically tagged, geocoded and linked in real time. Newspoints “guides” prompt producers through their newsgathering. “Guides” provide templates for news reporting situations based on input from experienced reporters, editors, producers and journalism educators. Newspoints also record the geographic location of every clip being recorded. All this information is stored in an XML file in a particular format. This XML file is passed as input to the Newspoints application which then parses this XML file and shows all the questions to be asked while conducting an interview, source name and shot type. All the data and multimedia collected by Newspoints are stored locally on the mobile device. All the information collected in the field is organized in a SQLite database and retrieved later to show all the assets belonging to a particular project. A user can review all of the assets that have been collected during the reporting process. The review screen displays clip metadata. User can delete any clip by long pressing on the asset. Newspoints gives users the option of archiving their assignment to and from remote storage such as Dropbox or Google Drive.